Wow. I'd never thought I'd actually see 1980s services like this in action. I always wondered what they were like. Cool, very cool.

Marvelous look into the building blocks of the internet. Obviously at the time, these online services were not unified.

They discuss email, bulletin boards, chat, news services, ordering travel tickets and hotel accommodations digitally, and other information services. Host Stewart Cheifet at one point enquires about the ability to load pictures through such services; a great foresight into what we just call a webpage.

While chatting with the guests they talk about how the delivery of the information was a bit slow with regard to response time, and that cable might be the way to go in terms of connecting to these servers/databases. Also, the laser disc was discussed as a means to bring text and media to the personal computer. CD-Roms and DVD-Roms became the standard, but they were on track with the eventual use of optical media.

I'm kind of all over the place. It was a pretty exciting show, especially from someone that was a mere child at the time this episode was produced.

How can the previous reviewer give 4 stars for something that you can't watch (unless you download the MPG2 version)?

There is no audio present in the streams, except for the MPEG2 download.